What really matters in life

Watching this election, and just having a stronger expectation of what we get from democratic elections and democratic discussion, and just a lot of reflections and realizations in my own life, I think I've finally found some perspective on politics, education, public service and service to others, money and career, love and family and how all those other things fit into the scheme of the last two and my life.

What I've had to come to accept is that the world is really full of quite a bit of bullshit. We live in it. We make money off of it. We make it sport. We, tragically, make life and death decisions by it. Much policy gets made on its basis. Even very smart people often get lost in it, because it is so pervasive, and sometimes in the hopes that their lives and contributions mean something.

Palaver is what James Combs and Dan Nimmo called it in their brilliant book The New Propaganda. Bullshit is what it is and what I'm sure Combs and Nimmo would call it in less politic moments.

It informs who we are, and yet so much of it is both bullshit and us taking our own bullshit too seriously. For many people, it is the only way they know how to identify themselves, and so much of it is for often self-centered or self-righteous purpose that ignores larger questions and answers that reason might offer. We swim in it so constantly and we want so badly to know that there is something outside of it. And yet politics, in particular, but also so many other areas of our public and private discourse, make it all so much more likely the more we center our attention around power and ego and wanting to prove to the world that we matter or that we have proven our worth.

There's nothing wrong with that motivation. It's just that we can't really find it the way we search for it and the way we treat one another. What we all really want is to have people say, "You've really contributed something important to life. You've really contributed something important to my life. You've really done something important. You've really proven your worth."

But no matter how much we do it, we're constantly tearing one another down or seeking out all that recognition or power or money or whatever for all the wrong reasons, out of our own fears that whatever we do or offer or contribute or make or whatever is just never enough. And, really, what we all want is just someone to say, "You matter. Your contributions matter. You deserve to be rewarded for what you have to offer."

And I guess, at some level, though having some more money wouldn't be such a bad thing and contributing something important to the world before I leave would feel like my time here was worth it, I guess the older I get, the more I realize that what really means something to me is having a life where I feel good about myself and my contributions, where I share love and have it shared with me, where I have as honest a relationship with people I care about as I feel I can, and where my efforts and my contributions feel like they mean something and are not just some irrelevant blip on a giant and forever cynical and denigrating screen.

The world has taken a turn, here, in the last few years, where that cynicism has become much more pronounced and where decency and honesty have been treated much less worthy than they obviously are when we're not trying to rationalize what cynics and shitheads we've become.

It occurred to me, today, that I am responsible for all of my failures in my life. That, though there have been times, as in everyone's life, that I haven't felt like and probably wasn't treated fairly and as generously or with as much forgiveness as I might have liked, that I am responsible for my failures as much as for my successes and that my life, at this point, is a consequence of my choices, good and bad.

My relationship with Brandi, my experience in graduate school, my first teaching job, all of it.

And what I would really like in my life, more than any of the money or attention or any of it, is love like the kind I've known before, and maybe a little bit more honest, even, than the fairly honest and open relationship that Brandi and I shared by the standards of most relationships, and definitely more loving and stable. I'd like a job that makes some kind of real difference in the world. I wouldn't mind making some money, but not at the expense of doing real good. I'd like to be somewhere where the important questions get explored and where my contributions might make some real difference in the world, whether that is close to people with power or not, since I'm pretty convinced that such people might make for some uneasy company, often.

Mostly, though, I'd just like to have a nice life that means something, in the bigger picture, without a lot of fanfare or attention, necessarily.

More than anything else, I just want to find someone that I can spend my life with and share some of these things that matter to me and weigh on my heart. I want to make some real successes in my life. Successes that matter, not these trite ones that we, myself included, so often settle for. And I want to share them with a woman and a family and friends and colleagues who are not all lost in the bullshit and propaganda and the bitterness and the cynicism and all of the stuff that makes life so much worse for the wear.

I want to live life sharing about the opportunity for us to do better, by being more honest with ourselves, and live lives that we love, not constantly staring at our navels and wondering why we always feel so afraid. I want to offer more real solutions to problems we face that transcend our tendency to propose ideas that fail and then to blame others for their failure because we lack the courage to acknowledge our failures. I want to offer a more honest and better example to my children.

But, mostly, I want to be share love with people, and especially one person who I spend my life with and who has comparable love to share with me. I want to be loved by someone with as much love as I have to offer. And I don't want to spend my life wondering if it's real because I've been burned in the past. That's why I wanted to be a teacher, actually. But it's always been why I wanted to fall in love and keep that flame alive for a lifetime. And to have a family and to have kids that I love with all my heart.

And what this election has taught me is that all of the successes that I've sought out before - in my career, for my favored political or social causes, financially or otherwise (though, being a teacher, that kind of success is not something that has figured highly in my estimation of my life), all of it - is much less important to me than that kind of love in my life.

I've spent a lot of time in my young adulthood after Brandi and I broke up - since Brandi had been the benchmark for me of what I wanted in life - wondering what kind of woman I might want to marry and to spend my life with. Smart women were often bitchy, I found, which I could not tolerate. Nice girls were often hard to hold a conversation with. I can't handle a snotty girl and a snotty anyone, for that matter, and must have someone I can have an honest and low-down-dirty sense of humor with. I need someone I can share openly and honestly with and as much as I need to, but I need someone to share back with me.

But the one thing that really rings true for me, these days, knowing how most people are, at this point, and knowing what I really admire in other people and what I really need in a spouse if I'm going to have a happy, loving, functional marriage for the course of my lifetime is someone with a lot of love to offer.

This is why I liked Brandi so much, when I first met her. It wasn't sexual. It was just a really loving spirit. And I just know, today, after much experience, that though women my age who still have that kind of love in their hearts and who are not lost in pain and fears and bitterness and the cynicism that follows is far too rare, that I will never really be happy in that way, again, until I find someone with that kind of heart, again.

And I realize, today, over the course of this election, that it is because politics and the world is so fucked up and so cynical and so nasty and repressive and illiberal and so dysfunctional, that I really need to have that kind of love in my life to feel any real sense of honest emotional safety and happiness in my life.

It was on a search for that kind of love, ironically, that really put my life in a tailspin, at one point, in so many ways. But it is only that kind of love that will ever really feel like something more honest and decent and real animates my life.

And now I know that I can only live a life with that kind of commitment. Because most of the world is too full of bullshit and the pursuit of bullshit to ever really come close to offering that kind of honest happiness.

We could have that kind of life if we would give up the bullshit. And, until we do, bullshit will never be something more real and honest.

I'll never feel that with having written or having read a book or as a teacher or helping to solve any of the problems that have animated the larger purposes in my life, I realize today. Those all might be fine things to do with my life.

But the truth is that I will not feel that except in the love of someone that has as much love to offer as I do. And nothing else is too much worthy of my time or efforts. And I just don't care about that other stuff, is the truth.

I have absolutely no clue where I'm going to find her. Which is ironic, because I have more interest from girls, these days, than I have ever had in my life. But having interest from a lot of women, even women who wouldn't have thought twice about me 10 or 20 years ago, is really not at all the same thing as having the love of someone with a lot of love to give. It really doesn't even compare, actually, I can say confidently, after experience with both.

I just wish I knew where to find her. Because nothing else matters at all really, to me, anymore, in even close to the same way.

Maybe that's why my apartment is still in boxes, why my ambitions just never feel quite as passionate as passion I have known in my life before, and why life just never feels quite right, no matter how much more I do with it. It's the only explanation that really makes any sense. I just wish I could translate that understanding into something real with someone and stop obsessing so much about a politics, a financial world, a world of unending public inquiry and opinion that really means so little that is real in my life and in this world as long as it so consumed with the bullshit as a means of avoiding what is real and meaningful.

I guess, at least, it offers perspective for my life. For what really matters.

When the dust settles

This Obama flap about Barack telling the truth about the ugly insecurities that are at the heart of what is wrong with the world and the politics meant to deal with the challenges of that world has got me thinking.

This whole godforesaken period of romanticism of the rules and force, like they solve more than they do, is reflective of a complex reality. On the one hand, it reflects all of those insecurities, which is why things have gotten so much worse. Because instead of challenging us to be better - which is what Obama has been doing with remarks like those he made about how many, especially uneducated, people tend "cling to guns and religion," when the going gets tough - so many people have chosen, instead to pander and coddle and genuflect and otherwise avoid the harder discussion which would involve challenging us to be better than our insecurities about life would suggest.

Our fears have driven us this period. That's what has fucked everything up. That's why I chunk it together the way I do. From about 2000/2001 to the current time, fear and insecurity has dominated the way that we have engaged in politics and the world. And it is reaped all sorts of bad consequences. And like the impulse that leads us to run with fear and insecurity as better guides than they are, we just keep rolling with those consequences until we can find the courage to face up to our failures.

Some people rarely or never find such courage. Many of those people are those who Barack was addressing. Neo-Nazis, Communists, radicals of all stripes, street thugs, serial killers. If you want a list of all of the people who fail to find the courage to face up to themselves, I'm sure it's quite long. And a lot of those folks, even when they don't situate themselves out in the extremes of contemporary life, are ordinary folks like you and I.

So, on the one hand, all this talk of rules and force is reflective of those fears and insecurities.

On the other hand, it is also a well-intentioned, if failed, effort to try to keep the world straight through all this mess.

The truth is that only our consciences can do that. Rules and force just complicate things, when they are used when other options are available and more effective. They always have. That's the nature of the bulk of our illiberal and repressive past. That's how it worked. We saw problems. We made rules. We used force. Things got fucked up. If you need a four sentence explanation of much of our tragic history, that will probably do. Our fears and insecurities drove us then, too. And they had consequence. And, luckily, then, as now, we had a handful of more honest people in the world - intellectuals, scholars, thinkers, compassionate and decent thinking folk all around made up the bulk of these people - who helped point us in better directions when our pride did not lead us to face up to our fuck ups.

Thank goodness for those folks, no matter how much we have always taken them for granted. Because this world would be in a much bigger mess if it weren't for their honesty. We'd be one big glob of bullshit and confusion. Which is why societies like Cuba and North Korea and Iran and Iraq and Syria and China and so many of the most repressive places in the world are such godawful messes. Because without the room for that kind of honesty - without that kind of freedom - there is no room to correct for the bullshit.

Nevertheless, all the talk about the rules and the rule of law, etc., is also, in part, a well-intentioned, if foolishly conceived, attempt to provide some kind of compass through all of the bullshit. But the truth is that the only compass that matters is a moral one, a compass of conscience and reason and judgment. And rules and force just make it all the more difficult to see through the bullshit, in great part because they help enhance it. Which is why so many indicators of well-being in the last 7-8 years have gotten worse and not better while we have rationalized them both.

If you have any doubts about that, go spend some time in places where rules and force are really taken seriously as governing philosophy, like any of those repressive countries I just named, and you will find a world of cynicism and ugliness with very little responsibility for the consequences they offer humanity.

There's really only one way forward. It's very much like any other regressive period in our past. You bullshit and bullshit all you want, but as things keep getting worse, people eventually start wanting better. They will today, too, just as always. It just takes some time to own up for the bullshit.

And when the dust settles, the only way forward is one of more freedom and more genuine, honest, and democratic engagement. Those who have studied liberal values know that deep down, even as many of them rationalize what they must know in their hearts is a bad direction.

And when we finally find our way, after fumbling around with this unfortunate path, we will not find a perfect world. Ever, really. What we will find is a world where more freedom and more genuine, honest, decent democratic engagement offers us better solutions, institututions, opportunities, etc., not perfect ones. Perfection and a perfect world doesn't exist. It's an illusion, and a dangerous one, at that, when it is used to rationalize all of the worst and most cynical gambles for power, greed, and a whole world full of ugliness. That's where the ulginess stems from, actually. That rationalization.

If the world isn't going to be fair, too many people rationalize, then I want to be on the side of the unfair stick that is to my advantage and to the disadvantage of others. It's an ugly gamble. It also happens to be one that doesn't pay off, much of the time, as it turns out. Honesty and virtue really do pay. Dishonesty really does end up fucking you in the end. I know from being on both sides of that stick, unfortunately. Most people have spent some time on both sides of that stick, unfortunately. Which should give us some compassion in a world where we all end up lost in the bullshit, some.

When the dust settles, we won't have a world that is completely fair. Even given a more honest commitment to our highest values, we will have a world that is more fair. There will never be a world that is perfectly fair. It just doesn't exist. We can make it more fair, with work. But this period has not been about making life more fair, really. This period has been about us rationalizing what shitheads we are.

Progress happens as we learn to own up for that tendency. And that is the only claim on progress that will ever be real. Everything else is a cheap shot meant to satiate our pettier natures that have just not learned to own up. Meaning, everything else is us avoiding the hard work that real progress necessitates. Which is fine. We're just never going to experience real progress without it. Avoid it all we want, I say. We're just not going anywhere until we own up.

That was the beauty of Barack's remarks. They reflected real progress. The need to be honest about ourselves. And to the extent that people resist that honesty, they can claim all kinds of things, but real progress isn't one of them.

A freer world will guarantee nothing. But that's the beauty of it. It places responsibility for our most important values and most important commitments - education, health care, retirement, employment and ownership, our democratic discussion, even national security, the most important priority that governments are responsible for - squarely in our laps. And if we don't take that responsibility, if we abdicate it, as we too often do today, then we are responsible for it, no excuses.

And that is the only way that we will make any real progress. Everything else is a well crafted illusion. And what always gives away illusions is that they never deliver.

It took 70 years for people to get figured out the illusion of Communism. I don't know how long it will take people to get this one figured out. At some level, I don't care. Because it's still an illusion, no matter how much its proponents prop it up. And eventually, whether it takes 70 years or 70 minutes, eventually people figure it out. It took thousands of years for humanity to get figured out that slavery was wrong. It took thousands of years for humanity to figure out that religion and unbridled force should not be the basis for governance and that reason and pragmatic, scientific, secular evaluations of ideas on their merits should be the basis for government. We eventually got it figured out. But it was wrong the whole time, no matter how much people pretended otherwise. This period is no different.

When the dust settles, we will choose freer lives. Because less free lives do not ever realize the illusion they promise. They just continue to sell the illusion. And when we do, that freedom will not solve all of our problems or make the world fair, out of the blue. We will need to make choices about how to solve our problems more effectively and how to make the world more fair. But it will be squarely up to us and noone else. And that will become clearer the more freedom we have and the more we take seriously that freedom and finding solutions that solve our problems on their merits and not based on some insecure, bitter, self-centered notion of how the world should be if it were perfect. It isn't and never will be. And facing that fact is probably the most important move towards progress that we could make.

More pandering and bullshit

Obama concedes remarks were ill-chosen

This is what I fuckin' hate about politics more than anything else.

"MUNCIE, Ind. - Democrat Barack Obama on Saturday conceded that comments he made about bitter working class voters who 'cling to guns or religion' were ill chosen, as he tried to stem a burst of complaints that he is condescending.

'I didn't say it as well as I should have,' he said.

As Obama tried to quell the furor, presidential rival Hillary Rodham Clinton hit him with one of her lengthiest and most pointed criticisms to date.

'Senator Obama's remarks were elitist and out of touch,' she said, campaigning about an hour away in Indianapolis. 'They are not reflective of the values and beliefs of Americans.'

At issue are comments Obama made privately at a fundraiser in San Francisco last Sunday. He explained his troubles winning over working class voters, saying they have become frustrated with economic conditions:

'It's not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.'

The comments, posted on the Huffington Post political Web site Friday, set off a storm of criticism from Clinton, Republican nominee-in-waiting John McCain and other GOP officials. It threatened to highlight an Obama Achilles heel — the image that the Harvard-trained lawyer is arrogant, aloof and carries himself with an air of superiority.

His campaign scrambled to defuse possible damage caused with working class voters that Obama needs to win in upcoming primaries in Pennsylvania and Indiana.

'Lately there has been a little typical sort of political flare up because I said something that everybody knows is true, which is that there are a whole bunch of folks in small towns in Pennsylvania, in towns right here in Indiana, in my hometown in Illinois who are bitter,' Obama said Saturday morning at Ball State University. 'They are angry. They feel like they have been left behind. They feel like nobody is paying attention to what they're going through.'

'So I said, well you know, when you're bitter you turn to what you can count on. So people, they vote about guns, or they take comfort from their faith and their family and their community. And they get mad about illegal immigrants who are coming over to this country.'

After acknowledging that his previous remarks could have been better phrased, he added:

'The truth is that these traditions that are passed on from generation to generation, those are important. That's what sustains us. But what is absolutely true is that people don't feel like they are being listened to.

'And so they pray and they count on each other and they count on their families. You know this in your own lives, and what we need is a government that is actually paying attention. Government that is fighting for working people day in and day out making sure that we are trying to allow them to live out the American dream."

But Clinton struck hard, calling Obama's comments 'demeaning.' The increased attack showed that Clinton is eager to hold on to her working class support and is looking to open new questions about Obama's judgment that would make voters and Democratic officials reconsider their support for the Illinois senator.

'I was raised with Midwestern values and an unshakable faith in America and its policies," she said. 'Now, Americans who believe in the Second Amendment believe it's a matter of constitutional right. Americans who believe in God believe it's a matter of personal faith.

'I grew up in a church-going family, a family that believed in the importance of living out and expressing our faith. The people of faith I know don't 'cling' to religion because they're bitter. People embrace faith not because they are materially poor, but because they are spiritually rich.

'Our faith is the faith of our parents and our grandparents. It is a fundamental expression of who we are and what we believe.'

'People don't need a president who looks down on them,' she said. 'They need a president who stands up for them.'"

What Barack Obama said was not ill-chosen. It was honest. And you know how I know that? Because I've spent my entire fucking life amongst such people. This is where I come from. They are bitter. They do turn to guns and religion and anti-trade and anti-immigrant impulses to rationalize their bitterness and insecurity in a world where they can never be responsible for their own situation. It is THE problem in poor communities, white, black, and otherwise in America, in liberal democracies, but probably in illiberal areas of the world, as well.

Why are people so generally afraid of speaking such truths?

Because there is a lot of these people. And they think, and the politicians who pander to them think, that if they just get together and rail against the world en masse, that noone will be able to speak such truths to such people.

They're bullies, is what they are. And if you notice, the policies they are advocating and people like Hillary Clinton are advocating for them, in her legacy of pandering endlessly to the bitter dumbasses of the world, are bullying too. They all involve repressive, illiberal, bullying measures looking to fuck with the guy you are competing with because you can't compete on your own merits. It's a fuckin' useless and destructive exercise. And working class people notoriously engage in it.

It's the Michael Barone philosophy of politics. It's why I don't like that guy. Or Hillary Clinton. Because they're both assholes looking to capitalize and pander to such bullshit, dishonestly, for their own weasley and dishonest ends, and fuck with every reasonable policy or policy discussion, in the meantime, because such discussions are held by people who are smarter and more honest than they are and such folks, Michael, in particular, explain their failure not because they can't compete but because those who are smarter and more honest then they are are just elites who can't understand the lives of salt-of-the-earth average people.

Michael Barone, Hillary Clinton, and those of their ilk pander and exploit the bitterness, insecurity, ignorance and other ignoble features of average Americans to have power over them rather than enlighten them and offer them real opportunities that only come with taking on real challenges.

I spent my entire life growing up with this bullshit. I spend my entire life with it now, working with such families and their kids.

But the difference between my approach and Hillary Clinton's approach is that I am honest with them about what is actually going to create the opportunities they are looking for.

And so is Barack Obama, here. Bitter dumbasses just often don't want to hear that truth because it pains them to face up to it. Which is goddamned foolish, because it costs them more in the long run to not face up to it. But Hillary Clinton doesn't care about the long run for working class people, is the truth. Neither does Michael Barone. What they both care about is the political and economic opportunities they create for themselves, right now.

And average Americans need to decide: am I going to go for the bullshit artist in the present or the honest leader for the future?

Honesty doesn't always feel good.

But it's better for you in the long run.

And the absence of it fucks with every legitimate policy and policy discussion in America and in liberal democracies that we face.

This is what I hate about politics. All of the bullshit. And the lying.

The problem for people like Hillary Clinton and Michael Barone and all of the dumbasses who fall for this bullshit is that dishonesty really doesn't serve you in the end. It's not a fairy tale. It's just a fact, jack.

So Michael Barone's legacy is that he's just some insecure asshole who worked at the U.S. News and World Report - not the most intellectually rigorous publication in the world, any sophomore in high school should be able to get figured out - and Hillary Clinton was some poorly reasoning, pandering, intellectually dishonest Senator from New York and has-been Presidential candidate who should have won it all but didn't because of all of those qualities. And all of the dumbasses that Barack is trying to be honest with in these comments can either go on being stupid, bitter, insecure, shitheads, lost in all that bullshit, and clinging to guns and religion and anti-trade and anti-immigrant impulses to rationalize all of it - just as similar dumbasses have and continue to cling to racism, nationalism, religious bigotry, homophobia, and any number of bullshit feelings about people to rationalize what fuckin' shitheads they are, or they can listen to the honesty, digest it and reflect on it a little, and use it to their advantage rather than forever trying to defend against the fucking obvious.

I got news for such people: none of those ways of looking at the world rationalize jack shit. You're just a shithead. Face the fuck up, shithead. It's better for you. I know from experience. Facing up to the bullshit makes you a better person. And it pays in the long run. And there is not a fuckin' pyrrhic victory in the world that could make up for that.

The problem with people is that they don't want to face their bullshit. And that is all of us. Just some of us have an easier time of it and some of us have a harder time of it.

Shitheads of the world thought they were going to pull a fast one on more honest people there for a bit. And more honest people have their own issues with being more honest with themselves and one another, of course.

But what the fuck do you know? Honest people come out on top. How the fuck about that?

And too fuckin' bad for the shitheads until they face up. But once you do, once we all do, things go better for us, for all of us. That goes for all of us. Me too.